Bad Feminism
by Student of Sith
Summary: Duo and Hilde star in this action-packed sequel to Too Easy


_I do not have the right to any of the characters other than Charles Muloth or to the setting in which this story was written. I'm just some stupid kid who decided to write a story._   
  
Charles Muloth was pleased. Last week, he had successfully removed one of the five thorns in the side of his employer, Oz. What pleased him most however was the way in which said thorn, the pilot Heero Yuy, had bee removed. The initial plan had been to attack him while he slept and level the ground around him, therefore removing any chance of survival. He had sent 400 Taurus Mobile Suits. Mobile Dolls were just not programmed for bombing missions.   
  
Once the mobile suits were in position around the enemy base, all four hundred were to open fire and level all the ground in a half kilometer radius. Unfortunately, Tauruses have a mind of their own, and one of the pilots didn't keep his under tight enough rein. As soon as the known enemy, the Gundam Wing, had come into sight, the Taurus Mobile Doll had shifted its shape from the plane to battle mode and opened fire. Had it fired at Heero, the mission would have been a success more quickly, but much less gratifyingly.   
  
Because of that one shot, a four hour chase into the Sanq kingdom ensued, and a battle which cost Oz hundreds of mobile dolls and pilots. No great loss there; no mobile doll was irreplaceable, and pilots were becoming less and less useful with the advent. Muloth expected His Excellency to have them all executed soon.   
  
But even despite the 100% casualty rate, the mission had been declared a success when, a week later, Heero Yuy had killed himself.   
  
All the data from the chase and the battle had been analyzed and reanalyzed, but it wasn't until that very morning that Oz analysts had figured out why Heero had killed himself. The news had still not given up hope that Relena Peacecraft was still alive after the battle left the capital city of the Sanq Kingdom in ruins, but she _was_ dead. An image which one of the mobile dolls had sent back right before it had been terminated confirmed that she had been in a building which was destroyed during the battle.   
  
A building which was destroyed by the hand of Heero Yuy himself.   
  
The professional record of the cooperation between the Gundams and Relena Peacecraft had been noticed, but no one had yet suggested that the cause may have been a personal relationship with one of the pilots. Now the connection was made by a replay of satellite photos depicting the aftermath of the battle. These photos contained Heero scrabbling over the rubble of the skyscraper. He killed himself less than a day later because she was dead.   
  


*** 

  
Hilde was preparing dinner for two at the house she and Duo Maxwell shared. She always prepared dinner for two, just in case Duo came home that night and wanted dinner. She always had hope. He had even been coming back every night for the past week, so she really expected him home tonight...   
  
But she finished making dinner and Duo wasn't home... When she finished eating, she put his food in the refrigerator, just in case, and cleaned her own dishes. Then she went into the living room and turned on the televiewer. The sun was still shining, as it did 22 out of the 24 hours of this stations rotation, so she pulled the shade to keep the sun from shining on the televiewer. On the screen was some trashy talk show about women who married their brothers but think their husbands are cheating with their mothers. She was too upset that Duo hadn't come home to change the channel, so she just slumped down on the couch and watched it.   
  
About halfway through, there was a five-minute news brief which Oz had apparently paid to have broadcast throughout every colony on every channel. It was about feminism. A female newscaster was talking about all the reasons that women should stay in, away from combat. It said that women should stay out of the work force and stay home to take care of babies and dinner. It was trying to discourage centuries of feminism!  
  
Hilde got so angry that she just turned off the televiewer and stormed out the door to her house. She was about to go for a brisk jog when she saw Duo, not ten feet away, walking home and whistling in the evening twilight, holding something behind his back. She ran up to him, gave him a hug and kissed him all over before giving him another hug. She then pulled back and slapped him across the face.  
  
"You kept me waiting! And I'm coming with you on your next mission!" she shouted at him. Duo's face went from the shock of the slap to dismay. He didn't take Hilde with him because she hadn't been trained from such a young age to be a perfect soldier, so she wasn't a nearly perfect pilot like her was.  
  
"But... but! You can't!" was the best Duo could muster. He didn't know what to do, so he pulled out the flowers from behind his back. 5 red roses surrounding one white rose greeted Hilde's beautiful face. "I bought these for you. That's why I was late..." he trailed off, seeing that they didn't make up for anything, and that she really didn't care about that right now. What was he supposed to say to her? "You're good enough to live with and sleep with, but not to fly with?"  
  
"Hilde, you were trained by the same people, and use a similar piloting style to the Oz pilots I fly against! I..." Duo paused, trying to think of a way to say the next sentence to come out of his mouth without insulting the woman he loved.  
  
Hilde said it for him. "You're a hundred timed better than the best of them. I saw you fly when we were both in that elite unit before you convinced me to leave Oz. You may be better than I am, but I am better than most of them."  
  
Duo looked at her, pleading with his eyes, trying to say without words that they both knew he didn't want her to die, and that she would die if she tried to do things as dangerous as things he did on a daily basis. "What about the mobile dolls, Hilde?" he finally asked. "Are you better than they are? They are mobile suits as good as or better than your own! I can handle them but I have Death Scythe, and Gundam! You have an out-of-date, off-the-shelf Taurus. How-"  
  
"I do not have an out-of-date, off-the-shelf Taurus! You may not have noticed, Duo Maxwell , but I have had a lot of free time while you're not around! I have been spending it upgrading my Taurus, using spare or broken parts from when you repair your Death Scythe. It has armor of pure Gundanium now, along with a beam saber and an improved targeting system. Yours may still be better than mine, but mine is better than anything Oz has!"  
  
As much as he wanted to, Duo could see that there was no way he could convince her otherwise. Ever since Heero had died, every mission had been a frenzy, more chaotic. The Oz pilots were getting cocky because they had heard a rumor that a Gundam pilot had been killed by Oz pilots. The fact that it couldn't be farther from the truth didn't bother them, because they had started taking chances. Those chances got them killed, but it also meant that they did things unexpectedly which made flying against them much more difficult.   
  
So Duo gave in. They went to bed together, as they always did. Duo tried to get up early without waking her, so that he could receive his mission and get out. Hilde would have none of that. As soon as the bed moved just that little bit from Duo's weight being removed, she was awake. While Duo was in the other room receiving mission specs, she was up and getting dressed. Duo came back, and was discouraged and a little annoyed that she was up, but got dressed with her. Neither one said a word.   
  
Duo was finished getting dressed first, since Hilde was a girl and it takes them longer to get dressed, and ran out to his Gundam. Half-way through his preflight check, Hilde ran out and got into her heavily modified black Taurus. A Taurus is much more automated than a Gundam, so they finished their preflight preparations at about the same time.   
  
"If you have your heart set on coming with me, Hilde, then I don't see how I can stop you. The best I can do is to try to keep you alive by giving you a copy of the mission plan. Transmitting message now."   
  
Dr. G's face appeared on Hilde's screen. An incredibly large nose stuck out from underneath a large plume of gray hair which covered half of his face. The lips began to move, and Hilde listened to his scratchy voice explain to her exactly what they were to do. Dr. G had apparently also noticed that Oz pilots were getting cocky because he was sending them to a base which had minimal security a couple hundred kilometers from the colony where they were.   
  
The Oz base was hidden on an asteroid which was currently orbiting one of the moons of Mars. Dr. G's face shifted up into the upper left corner of the screen so that an aerial picture of the base could be shown. In a very choppy movie, the picture began to zoom in, then turned into a 3d map of the base, showing all of its hallways and buildings. It gave a detailed breakdown of exactly where each Space Leo was positioned and Dr. G told Duo to get in and out quickly, before reinforcements could arrive.   
  
Little chance of that with me around, thought Hilde, thinking with a slight pang of guilt that she would slow him down. But she had determined to go. There was no way she was turning back. She was going on this mission. "Seems a bit easy, Duo."  
  
"Yeah, well so did a lot of my missions. It's not easy. Keep your guard up, you will be outnumbered." Duo was extremely worried for her. He sat in his cockpit tensing and untensing every muscle in his body again and again. Why is she doing this to me? he thought. He hit the button to activate his jets and he was off into the freedom of space.  
  
Hilde activated her jets right behind him. She followed him up into space, flying in formation like she had been trained to do, matching each maneuver he made. They flew for about an hour before they reached visual range of their target, then they slowed down so that they would be harder to detect. Another fifteen minutes passed before they could actually identify the purple Leos at the base. Luckily, Death Scythe and Hilde's Taurus were both black, and were harder to see in the darkness of space. Duo drew the weapon for which Death Scythe was named and kicked up the power to every jet in his Gundam, sending him flying towards the base. Hilde shifted back into the Taurus's anthropomorphic shape, drew her beam saber, and followed him down.   
  
Duo came down fast on the Leos, slashing through four of them in one fell swing. Hilde slashed one from nape to nave from behind, quickly whirling immediately afterwards to face a couple more. She had the Taurus's legs running right relative to its torso, which she kept turning so that she could take some shots with her powerful beam cannon. She made her Suit's legs swerve left and then right again to make her a harder target and just fired shot after shot at the enemies. I'm doing pretty well! Thought Hilde as she blasted her fourth Leo into oblivion, only suffering two minor hits.   
  
Then she looked over at Duo. The Death Scythe stood in the center of the area on which they had landed without a scratch on it, surrounded by thirty completely destroyed Leos. Duo was working very hard inside his mobile suit to keep himself from hyperventilating. Hilde had no idea how many of those thirty Suits around him had been about to destroy her from behind. "You ready to continue the mission?" He finally asked over the comm., once he had regained his composure.  
  
"Sure, right behind you." Hilde replied. He had just stood there for too long.   
  
But Death Scythe turned towards the base entrance and started walking. Hilde followed. She didn't like this closed off space, with little room to maneuver or dodge any shots which were fired at her. They walked down this long, straight corridor for a full minute before it opened up into a large room with dozens and dozens of unmanned Mobile Suits of various types: Leos, Ares, Tauruses, and even some of a completely alien design which Hilde didn't recognize.   
  
"Jackpot!" Shouted Duo. He immediately went to work smashing each of the mobile suits in the room with his scythe. Hilde followed with her beam saber, going in the other direction, cutting a swath through empty shells which only became deadly with a pilot inside. In a moment, she and Duo couldn't see one another because too many empty mobile suits separated them. She raised her saber for one more blow when something unexpected happened. The Taurus behind her activated. A second later, all of the Tauruses were active.   
  
Duo knew what to do when he saw all the lights go on inside the enemy Tauruses. He slashed the one right in front of him, then ducked behind other mobile suits which he hadn't destroyed yet and let the other Dolls do the work for him. He jumped at the automatic Mobile Suits from out of nowhere and cut them in half before disappearing into the mass of other suits in the room. But this room was too small, the enemy too numerous, so he started backing towards the door. He could fight them outside much more easily.   
  
"Let's get out of here, Hilde!" he shouted. When he didn't get a response, he checked to make sure the comm. was on and called her again. "Hilde, come on, there's no time for games or heroics or feminism! Let's go!" Still nothing. "Hilde!" He called her name one final time before he reached the entrance to the room, where he turned and ran. He didn't have room to even spread his wings to use his jets, so he had to actually put one of Death Scythe's feet in front of the other again and again. The first Taurus had just gotten to the entrance of the hallway when Duo got out of it. "Hilde, come in! Hilde! Hilde, speak to m-" his voice caught in his throat. "Hilde speak to me!"  
  
But then he stopped trying to talk to her. The first Taurus was outside, where he said that he would fight them. Duo spread Death Scythe's wings and flew upwards to come down with a slashing stroke on the enemy Doll, but the Doll flew up to meet him. Duo kicked his left engines, sending him flying right as he swung his blade left to cut the Taurus in half.   
  
Two more Tauruses were out by now, and they both came up to fight him directly. Duo fired a couple of well aimed shots from his left shoulder cannon into the control center of the Taurus on the right. All of its lights went out and it just continued on it original trajectory in the vacuum of space. The other Taurus altered its path so that it could attack him from his left, which was relatively undefended since his scythe was in his right hand.   
  
Normally, this would not have been a problem. Duo just swung around and slashed through the Taurus with his scythe, but he was sluggish. Before the control center near the head was severed from the right arm, the enemy Taurus got off a shot from its beam cannon and took off Death Scythe's leg. By the time that Taurus had been dealt with, a half dozen more were out of the corridor.   
  
The first three Tauruses jetted straight up to Duo, while the other three sat on the base's landing platform and just started firing at range. The three who were attacking directly were firing at him with a computer's deadly accuracy, but Duo just kept dodging right, left, down. Then he came up from beneath them and cut two of them to ribbons before the third blew off his right wing.   
  
Eighteen Tauruses stood on the landing platform of the base as Duo cut open the Taurus next to him. Each of the Tauruses stopped aiming directly at him and started firing a blanket of laser fire at him. Duo kept dodging as best he could, but he wasn't at his best, and there were too many of them. "I'm coming, Hilde. See you in a minute," said Duo quietly, as he flew straight towards his enemies and flicked the auto destruct switch.   
  
He never knew that it actually worked this time because he was hit by a direct shot from one of the Dolls before his suit detonated and unloaded the extra megaton payload he had loaded into the bottom of Death Scythe's torso. 


End file.
